May 24 (Bloomberg) -- Arms-control and humanitarian groups
are pressing President Barack Obama to seek a tough
international treaty restricting sales of conventional arms.

“We are writing to encourage you and your administration
to spare no effort to seize the historic opportunity to
negotiate a robust, bullet-proof Arms Trade Treaty,” groups
including the Arms Control Association, Amnesty International
USA and Oxfam America wrote in a letter to Obama.

The United Nations will attempt in July to establish the
first international standards for the export and transfer of
conventional weapons. While embracing the initiative in concept,
Obama administration officials have said business opportunities
for U.S. military companies must be protected.

“We do not want something that would make legitimate
international arms trade more cumbersome than the hurdles United
States exporters already face,” Thomas Countryman, assistant
secretary of state for international security and
nonproliferation, said in an April 16 speech to the Stimson
Center in Washington.

How to deal with international traders of conventional arms
has been a thorny issue for the Obama administration.

When the Pentagon needed helicopters for the Afghan
military, it turned to Russia’s state-run arms trader,
Rosoboronexport, even though the company is a top arms supplier
to the Syrian regime that has killed thousands of its civilians
to quell an uprising.

Sales to Syria

A new international arms treaty “would make it much more
difficult for states like Russia to justify sales to the Assad
regime,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control
Association, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, said in
an interview.

More than $2.2 billion in arms and ammunition have been
imported since 2000 by countries operating under arms embargoes,
according to a report by Oxford, U.K.-based Oxfam International.

Syria imported more than $1 million in small arms and light
weapons, ammunition and other munitions in 2010, as well as air-defense systems and missiles valued at an additional $167
million, the report found.

While the U.S. would like to target regimes such as Syria,
stumbling blocks may hinder the international consensus needed
to negotiate the arms treaty within the four weeks allotted by
the UN, Kimball said. Chief among those obstacles is the
question of whether the treaty will cover the sale of
ammunition, he said.

Controlling Ammunition

The arms-control advocates said ammunition must be covered
in a treaty.

“The world is already full of guns,” the groups wrote in
their May 22 letter to Obama. “It is the constant flows of
ammunition that feeds and prolongs conflicts and armed
violence.”

Countryman, in his Stimson Center speech, called the
regulation of ammunition “hugely impractical,” while he said
the administration remains “open-minded.”

In the letter to Obama, the groups said, “Thousands of
civilians around the globe are slaughtered each year by weapons
that are sold, transferred by governments or diverted to
unscrupulous regimes, criminals, illegal militias and terrorist
groups.”